AT DUVALIER HOME, SPLENDOR IN RUINS

By JAMES BROOKE, Special to the New York Times

Published: February 10, 1986

KENSCOFF, Haiti, Feb. 9—
Discarded on a living room floor here lay a state invitation engraved with the name of the villa's owner: Son Excellence Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Part of the ornate script was smudged by the rough footprint of an uninvited guest, a Haitian peasant.

Within hours after the Duvaliers secretly fled this country early Friday morning, angry mobs started sacking the family estates.

A tour of the estates today found most of them picked clean. But enough clues remained to show that the family maintained a regal way of life in a country generally regarded as the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

Here at Mr. Duvalier's Alpine-style retreat in the cool hills half an hour north of the capital, mobs had forced open the 15-foot-high wrought-iron gates. Doors Torn From Hinges

They then tore every door off its hinges, smashed every window and tore out all the frames. Pine boards with which the chalet was faced had been ripped out as high as a man could reach. All chandeliers and light and plumbing fixtures had been torn out and carried off, along with all the furniture.

''The robbers robbed,'' a Frenchwoman said with a smile as she stood in the living room next to a smashed bay window. She took a step and her feet crunched on glass shards, scratching the parquet.

Everything of value had been carried off or destroyed, but wrappers left behind spoke of the expensive tastes of Haiti's first family.

Poking among the smashed china and broken crystal, one could find a box top from Gucci, an envelope from Cartier, an order form from Saks Fifth Avenue, a box top from B. Altman & Company, a package wrapper from the Parisian sheet maker D. Porthault. This wrapper was addressed to the Duvalier family's interior decorator, who had been staying at the Hotel Ritz in Paris.

Outside on a terrace, among fragments of planters decorated with Chinese dragons, lay a shipping label from Harrods, the London department store. Dated Nov. 14, 1985, and marked ''one of 20 lots,'' the label was addressed to ''Mrs. Michele B. Duvalier, First Lady, Palais National, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.'' A Shopping Spree in Paris

In early November, Mrs. Duvalier and her decorator reportedly spent several million dollars on a shopping spree in Paris, London and New York.

Several weeks later a petroleum tanker refused to unload here because the Government did not have the cash to pay in advance. Transport ground to a halt, and at the end of November the first anti-Government protests broke out.

''They should keep this house like this for our children to see,'' said a Haitian woman, one of several who had made a Sunday outing of the visit.

What the looters had been unable to carry off they destroyed. Banisters were torn off staircases. In bathrooms, wall mirrors lay smashed in a thousand pieces.

Despite the fury of the attack, a villa next door was untouched, every window intact. Visits to other Duvalier estates proved this to be a common pattern.

''These houses were chosen because they were owned by people who were part of the regime,'' said Raymond Baker, a Haitian. Another Sunday sightseer, Mr. Baker had stopped his car on a road leading to a peach-colored villa that was being built by Marie Denise Bennett, the oldest sister of Mr. Duvalier. Here, too, looters had taken what they could. Movies for the Children

''The crowd must have gone through here, but they didn't touch a thing,'' Mr. Baker, pointing to neighboring houses. As he talked, two barefoot peasant boys scampered by with uprooted tropical plants in their hands.

On the top floor of the three-story villa, another Haitian man squinted into the eyepiece of his video camera and filmed the sweeping view of Port-au-Prince.

''Super, magnifique,'' he muttered as he lowered his camera to film a frieze of naked women above the empty swimming pool.

The man, who would give his name only as Alex, said he was taking home movies to show his children.

''This is our second independence, a new era,'' he said before leading the way to the next attraction, the hilltop villa of Joan B. Thiesfeld, another sister of Mrs. Duvalier.

This boxy, International-style house, also peach colored, had been thoroughly ransacked, but the surrounding houses had been left untouched.

''So it's here all our taxes went,'' a Haitian man said, staring glumly at a pink whirlpool bath that had been torn from its foundation. Outside, two empty bottles of Champagne, dated 1972 and 1979, stood by an undamaged satellite television antenna. Their Taste in Reading

The television sets had long since disappeared, but reading materials left behind gave an idea of the Duvalier clan's taste in literature: French comic books, a French erotic magazine, a news weekly published by Haitian dissidents, the May 1985 bulletin of the American Orchid Society and a sociology book, ''Peasants and Poverty - A Study of Haiti'' by Mats Lundahl.

In the capital, on Rue Pacot, a hilly suburb, soldiers had acted in time to save the mansion of Simone Duvalier, the widow of Francois Duvalier, who founded the family's dynastic rule here in 1957.

With a click and a whirr, the large electronically controlled metal gates swung open, and Jean Petit-Homme, sergeant of the presidential guard, approached with a wide smile.

''The chain is broken - now it's our own affair,'' he said, escorting three visitors past terraced beds of red poinsettias to a Mediterranean-style villa complete with a red-tile roof and wrought-iron balconies. Doors Remain Locked

Set against a background of green corrugated hills, the villa had been Jean-Claude Duvalier's residence until he married, nearly six years ago. His mother lived there until Friday morning, when she locked the doors and left. Today the doors were still locked, but a tour of the grounds gave a good picture of the Duvalier way of life.

Protected by a wall that in places rose to 30 feet was a world of terraced lawns for strolling, of cypress, mango and pine trees for shade, and a profusion of hyacinth, geranium and jacaranda blooms for color.

Two snow-white geese paddled around an azure colored swimming pool.

''I don't know whether they're supposed to be in there,'' Sergeant Petit-Homme said. ''Before we weren't allowed near the pool. We used to sleep on the lawn.''